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Almost every infrastructure decision I endorse or regret

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Re: Almost every infrastructure decision I endorse or regret

#291

> Picking AWS over Google Cloud I know this is an unpopular opinion but I think google cloud is amazing compared to AWS. I use google cloud run and it works like a dream. I have never found an easier way to get a docker container running in the cloud. The services all have sensible names, there are fewer more important services compared to the mess of AWS services, and the UI is more intuitive. The only downside I ha…

Totally agree, GCP is far easier to work with and get things up and running for how my brain works compared to AWS. Also, GCP name stuff in a way that tells me what it does, AWS name things like a teenage boy trying to be cool.

That's completely opposite to my experience. Do you have any examples of AWS naming that you think is "teenage boy trying to be cool"? I am genuinely curious.

Re: Almost every infrastructure decision I endorse or regret

#292
post #267

Utter insanity. So much cost and complexity, and for what? Startups don’t think about costs or runway anymore, all they care about is “modern infrastructure”. The argument for RDS seems to be “we can’t automate backups”. What on earth?

Is spending time to make it reliable worth it vs working on your actual product? Databases are THE most critical things your company has.

Re: Almost every infrastructure decision I endorse or regret

#293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't want to be negative, but this post reads like a list of things that I want to avoid in my career. I did a brief stint in cloud stuff at a FAANG and I don't care to go back to it. Right now I'm engineer No. 1 at a current startup just doing DDD with a Django monolith. I'm still pretty Jr. and I'm wondering if there's a way to scale without needing to get into all of the things the author of this article mentio…

I bet Craigslist runs on much simpler infrastructure. Not sure how much they’re worth though

Stackoverflow famously grew huge for a long time on a single Windows box. I don’t recommend that but yeah KISS rule definitely. Floss version: supabase, open telemetry, etc.

Re: Almost every infrastructure decision I endorse or regret

#294

> Picking AWS over Google Cloud I know this is an unpopular opinion but I think google cloud is amazing compared to AWS. I use google cloud run and it works like a dream. I have never found an easier way to get a docker container running in the cloud. The services all have sensible names, there are fewer more important services compared to the mess of AWS services, and the UI is more intuitive. The only downside I ha…

> I have never found an easier way to get a docker container running in the cloud I don't have a ton of Azure or cloud experience but I run an Unraid server locally which has a decent Docker gui. Getting a docker container running in Azure is so complicated. I gave up after an hour of poking around.

Azure is a complete disaster, deserves its own garbage-category, and gives people PTSD. I don't think AWS/CGP should ever be compared to it at all.

Re: Almost every infrastructure decision I endorse or regret

#296

> There are no great FaaS options for running GPU workloads This hits hard. Someone please take my (client's) money and provide sane GPU FaaS. Banana.dev is cool but not really enterprise ready. I wish there was a AWS/GCP/Azure analogue that the penny pinchers and MBAs in charge of procurement can get behind.

I am confused. Doesn't Modal Labs solve this?

Definitely. But the sad reality is that in some corporate environments (incumbent finance, government) if it's not a button click in portal.azure.com away, you can spend 6-12 months in meetings with low energy gloomboys to get your access approved.

Re: Almost every infrastructure decision I endorse or regret

#297
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem you have here is by the time you reach the size of this DB, you are on a special discount rate within AWS.

Discount rates are actually much better too on the bigger instances. Therefore the "sticker price" that people compare on the public site is no where close to a fair comparison. We technically aren't supposed to talk about pricing publically, but I'm just going to say that we run a few 8XL and 12Xl RDS instances and we pay ~40% off the sticker price. If you switch to Aurora engine the pricing is absurdly complex (its…

> but I'm just going to say that we run a few 8XL and 12Xl RDS instances and we pay ~40% off the sticker price.

Genuinely curious, how do you that?

We pay a couple of million dollars per year and the biggest spend is RDS. The bulk of those are 8xl and 12xl as you mention and we have a lot of these. We do have savings plans, but those are nowhere near 40%.

Re: Almost every infrastructure decision I endorse or regret

#298

> Picking AWS over Google Cloud I know this is an unpopular opinion but I think google cloud is amazing compared to AWS. I use google cloud run and it works like a dream. I have never found an easier way to get a docker container running in the cloud. The services all have sensible names, there are fewer more important services compared to the mess of AWS services, and the UI is more intuitive. The only downside I ha…

Heartily seconded. Also don't forget the docs: Google Cloud docs are generally fairly sane and often even useful, whereas my stomach churns whenever I have to dive into AWS's labyrinth of semi-outdated, nigh-unreadable crap.

To be fair there are lots of GCP docs, but I cannot say they are as good as AWS. Everything is CLI-based, some things are broken or hello-world-useless. Takes time to go through multiple duplicate articles to find anything decent. I have never had this issue with AWS.

GCP SDK docs must be mentioned separately as it's a bizarre auto-generated nonsense. Have you seen them? How can you even say that GCP docs are good after that?

Re: Almost every infrastructure decision I endorse or regret

#299
post #7

> The markup cost of using RDS (or any managed database) is worth it. Every so often I price out RDS to replace our colocated SQL Server cluster and it's so unrealistically expensive that I just have to laugh. It's absurdly far beyond what I'd be willing to pay. The markup is enough to pay for the colocation rack, the AWS Direct Connects, the servers, the SAN, the SQL Server licenses, the maintenance contracts, and a…

That's a huge instance with an enterprise license on top. Most large SaaS companies can run off of $5k / m or cheaper RDS deployments which isn't enough to pay someone. The amount of people running half a million a year RDS bills might not be that large. For most people RDS is worth it as soon as you have backup requirements and would have to implement them yourself.

>Most large SaaS companies can run off of $5k / m or cheaper RDS deployments which isn't enough to pay someone.

After initial setup, managing equivalent of $5k/m RDS is not full time job. If you add to this, that wages differ a lot around the world, $5k can take you very, very far in terms of paying someone.

Re: Almost every infrastructure decision I endorse or regret

#300
This guy gets it, I agree with it all. The exception being, use Fargate without K8s and lean on Terraform and AWS services rather than the K8s alternatives. When you have no choice left and you have to use K8s, then I would pick it up. No sense going down into the mines if you don't have to.
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